Vista not loading to desktop....

Vista Home Premium x64 - the system boots to the login screen, I enter the password, it's accepted, Vista starts loading but after about 4-5 seconds I get an error about the user profile being corrupt. Normally, I'd simply run the clean up tool for a corrupt profile, but without any desktop access this is a bit tricky. Is there any way to repair the corrupt user profile from a PECD (like the UBCD4Win or a Barts CD?) or maybe by using the MSDaRT disc (MicroSoft Diagnostic And Recovery Toolkit) or the Vista install disc? Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

(I can try System Restore from the MSDaRT disc, but the nearest restore point is about 2 moths old and I'd rather not go back that far since I don't have a lot of faith in System Restore's ability to not screw up and lose any files created between August and October)

 

F8 Last Known Good Config no good?

 

Nope - "Last Known Good Config" did nothing . . . the exact error message says this:

This comes up about 4-5 seconds after the login password has been accepted.
:banghead

Any other suggestions will be appreciated!! Thanks!

(I've already tried running Startup Repair and several other things on the Vista install disc and on the MSDaRT disc - no dice)

 

:celebrate
Problem solved!! Luckily, the UBCD4Win has a remote registry editing feature, so you can make registry changes w/o booting to Windows. So, I followed the steps at this link (which was written for Win7 but worked fine with Vista) and now the problem is solved!!!
:-D

 

Good job. I wonder, though: what happens if there is only a single account?

 

The PC I was working on only had a single account.... that's why I booted to a UBCD4Win, then used the registry editing features built-in to the CD. Alternatively, sometimes you can boot to Safe Mode on a single account PC and then select Adminstrator, then make the needed reg edits....